The real difference between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji

Both are extremely intelligent, articulate and successful women with courage and integrity. Both are equally critical of "tribal" or "desert" Islam to which both were attracted for a time. One is now a self-confessed infidel, the other a believer.

How is it that each took such divergent paths toward the common goal of living their lives in freedom? Is there a broader lesson to be learnt beyond Islam?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in a politically tense Somalia which exploded into civil war, and which in turn ushered in an increasingly dominant, exclusive, violent form of political Islam. During her family's forced migration to Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya as political refugees, the family lived in strongly Islamist enclaves.

Forcefully mutilated genitally as a child, at 22 Ayaan fled to the Netherlands to escape an arranged marriage. There she learnt to stand on her own feet, went through university and entered parliament. Classed as an infidel and condemned by a fatwa, she is now at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C.

There she helped found and now directs the AHA Foundation, established to defend the rights of women in the West against militant Islam.

Ayaan published a collection of essays entitled The Caged Virgin, and has published two volumes chronicling her personal journey from Islam to atheism and freedom under the titles Infidel and Nomad.

Three key elements of Islam, as she experienced and understood them, led her to reject the faith.

First, that a Muslim's relationship with God is one of fear to an Absolute who demands total submission.

Second, Islam's only moral source is the Prophet, to the exclusion of so-called secular wisdom.

Third, and finally, that Islam is strongly dominated by a sexual morality derived from tribal Arab values where "a woman is reduced to her hymen."

She thus utterly rejected Islam as an ideology that keeps women as "caged virgins."

Ayaan likewise rejects liberal interpretations of the Qur'an as irrelevant. For her the issue does not revolve around the work of a minority of liberal scholars re-reading the text, for Islam is not primarily a creed or cult.

Islam is, for Ayaan, a total way of life, the way the text is lived by the living Muslim umma' is decisive - Islam is "our ideology, our political conviction, our moral standard, our law and our identity."

The devastation of 11 September 2001 was decisive for Ayaan. Having discovered freedom and democracy in secular Europe, she aligned herself with right-wing political parties in the Netherlands, and later joined the right-wing American Enterprise Institute.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's journey has been from total submersion in an all-encompassing faith community to radical individualism within a secular democracy.

Similarly, Irshad Manji was four when her family fled Idi Amin Dada's Uganda. She was raised in liberal Canada where, as a child, she had already begun to question literalist interpretations of the Qur'an.

Irshad accepts her sexuality as lesbian, and has hosted an extremely successful program called Queer Television.

Today she is the director of two international advocacy networks - the Moral Courage Project (which aims to challenge political correctness, intellectual conformity and self-censorship: "we are citizens rather than members of mere tribes ... meaningful diversity embraces different ideas and not just identities") and Project Ijtihad (which promotes Islam's own tradition of critical thinking, debate and dissent, embracing a diversity of choices, expression and spirituality).

Irshad published her call for the reform of Islam as The Trouble with Islam Today. She describes herself as a "Muslim Refusenik," by which she means that she refuses "to join an army of automatons in the name of Allah."

Her work poses a fundamental question to Muslims in the West: "Will we remain spiritually infantile, caving to cultural pressures to clam up and conform, or will we mature into full-fledged citizens, defending the very diversity that allows us to be in this part of the world in the first place?"

Interestingly, it is her reading of the Qur'an that permits her to enjoy a lesbian partnership and celebrate her sexuality on television and in writing.

On the face of it, the difference between Ayaan's and Irshad's stories are vast and complex. Nevertheless, I think their differences can be boiled down to three key issues: their God-experience, their experience of family and sexuality, and their techniques of sacred reading.

God-experience - From her family, the mullahs and the mosque, Ayaan experienced Allah as a male tyrant who demanded total submission. Hence, in Ayaan's experience, family, mosque and mullah congealed into a single totalitarian system forcing her into a state of passive obedience.

Needless to say, with Ayaan's Allah, there is no dialogue or questioning.

While Irshad was expelled as a child from a madrasah and was estranged from her violent father, she developed an open faith to an ever merciful Allah, and has always been lovingly accepted by her mother.

She has discovered many pro-diversity verses in the Qur'an and encountered a God who makes everything "excellent," where nothing is in vain, where God creates "whom he pleases."

Irshad patiently mined the Qur'an, as she felt she had to be fair both to her faith and to herself. "The only approval I seek is that of my creator and that of my conscience."

Consequently, Irshad's Allah brings out what is most important and beautiful in her life, which in turn she refuses to reduce either to her queerness or to her religion.

The intolerant Allah that Ayaan rejected suppressed her female self, while the compassionate Allah that Irshad has embraced accepts her just as she is.

Family and sexuality - These divergent experiences of Allah dovetail into their divergent experiences of family and sexuality.

As long as she remained within Islam, Ayaan felt like a "caged virgin." She experienced Islamic morality as a "desert morality" where women were the property of their fathers, brothers, uncles, grand-fathers, sons or guardians.

"A man's reputation and honour," she wrote, "depend entirely on the respectable, obedient behaviour of the female members of his family." This encapsulating patriarchal family prison mirrored her image of the arch-patriarch, the tyrannical Allah.

Ayaan could in no way distinguish between "culture" and "religion," her god and her family, the mosque and the madrasah slot into a single all-encompassing system of submission.

While Irshad's family, mosque and madrasah were, like those of Ayaan, conventional and patriarchal, her life context was liberal, multi-cultural, pluralistic Canada. Living in an openly tolerant culture since the age of four allowed her to question her "tribal Islam" without feeling the need to reject it.

Her network of friends within and without Islam and a liberal education prevented her family and mosque from imprisoning her within a total system and gave her the tools to think faith issues through to the core.

For Irshad, Islam is but one vital element in her life which converses with all the other aspects of her life, including her sexuality.

Sacred reading (tafsir) - Ayaan reads a Qur'an full of contradictions, a composite text which has been interpreted by patriarchal authority in order to repress women since the beginning. She rejects this "literalist" reading of the mullahs without admitting to any viable alternative.

By way of contrast, Irshad Manji subjects the Qur'an to a feminist reading, interpreting each ayat within the context that gave it birth and within the context in which the Qur'an was put into writing over a century later. She likewise places patriarchal readings of the Qur'an over the centuries within their historical contexts.

The differing reading models used by Ayaan and Irshad point to a fundamentally different attitude to faith and its revelation in the scriptures.

While both Ayaan and Irshad are equally sharp in their critiques of Islam and both write with great passion, Ayaan's writings are harsh and dogmatic, whereas Irshad employs a disarming sense of humour.

Literalist interpretations and their dogmatic rejection take the text too seriously, while contextual feminist readings are more relaxed. A literalist reading sees either contradictions and so rejects the whole (Ayaan) or attempts to iron them out into the staid, boring, shallow, linear, "foundational" consistency (conservative mullahs).

A contextual approach views "contradiction" as paradox where seemingly self-contradictory statements are understandable as expressions of the greatness and mystery of Allah.

Faith is beyond reason, without necessarily being irrational, and is better expressed in symbol and narrative, parable and paradox. Herman Roborgh has even suggested that it is precisely by sharing our paradoxes that Muslims and Christians can engage in true dialogue.

Interestingly, when Ayaan Hirsi Ali collaborated with Theo van Gogh on the short film Submission Part I, Ayaan's usual brittleness was softened and the words and images of the film came across as honest, tender, and even beautiful.

But while Theo van Gogh agreed to collaborate in a follow-up film (Submission Part II), he insisted that Ayaan must put some humour into it.

Humour allows us to face the contradictions of life - including those in our faith and their written scriptures. Humour sanctions riddle and paradox as we open ourselves to the mystery of God. Dogmatic intolerance, by contrast, is both blind and joyless.

I began by asking whether there is any crucial factor that led Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji to take divergent paths in seeking the common goal of personal freedom.

I find it understandable that the brutal circumstances into which Ayaan was born, and the total system in she grew, led her to seek freedom through atheism in a secular society. There was, apparently, no way of escaping that system apart from the complete rejection of her faith community.

In contrast, pluralistic Canada provided the space for Irshad Manji to negotiate a liberationist feminist faith within Islam. She plunged into the depths of her faith by rejecting literalist modes of reading and employing literary approaches that laid open the Divine mystery through riddle and paradox.

It seems to me, then, that the prerequisite for negotiating one's faith and discovering its liberating core is pluralism.

A space for cultural, social, political and religious dialogue opened up that possibility for Irshad Manji and has also done so for many Muslim women in Muslim majority societies.

John Mansford Prior was a Divine Word Missionary (SVD) in eastern Indonesia. He has been lecturer at St Paul's Institute of Philosophy, Ledalero, and was consultant to the Pontifical Council for Culture, Vatican, from 1993 to 2008.

Related

Both Ayaan Hirsi Ali (right) and Irshad Manji are intelligent women of courage, who reject "tribal" Islam. But one is an infidel, the other a believer.